[Tagging] How to tag small canals?

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 16. Aug 2018, at 15:36, Philip Barnes <phil at trigpoint.me.uk> wrote:
> 
> In British English usage we have regional names for the category between a stream and a river. Where I come from they are called Brooks, but I am aware of Burns and Becks being used in the North.


there are a lot of different categories and types of watercourses in natural language, e.g. there are runnel, trickle, runlet, rill, rivulet, torrent, creek (AE?), stream, anabranch, waterway, drainage channel, irrigation ditch, ...

We won’t need all of these as tags, but as soon as we can decide/find out what the waterway classification is about, we can see how to organize it ;-). Clearly there is a reason natural language has developed more than one or two words for kinds of watercourses, it makes conversation easier.

As I said, irrigation isn’t covered at all (or at least the wiki is self-contradicting with respect to irrigation). As a German, I would also appreciate having a category for major rivers (in German: „Strom“, apparently English doesn’t have a proper word for it).

Cheers,
Martin